Having a problem degraining.

[Bruce/Fl]

I've been using John Meyers restoration script, and for 90-some percent of my files it works wonders. It truly enhances the film. But I came across a section where it couldn't handle the grain. In fact, it looked worse after going through the script. And it is a grainy section. John tried to get as much out of his script to deal with it, but it seems the degraining filters in use can only do so much. So I thought I'd bring it over here for some of you magicians to work with.

Does anyone here have any thoughts or a different approach?

Here as a short sample. It is 15fps, ProRes422 1920x1080. 2:2 pulldown, so there is doubles of every frame.

https://www.dropbox.com/s/dyaidj5bq5t1bs8/Reel%207%20sample.mov?dl=0

[Bruce/Fl]

Here is a youtube example to give you an idea of what I am dealing with. Select the 4K resolution, you can see the difference.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t-ZCyjQ2lVQ&feature=youtu.be

And if it looks familiar, I posted a very similar clip months ago, just looking for a degrain assist, before I moved on to the entire restoration script. That thread can be found here. (http://forum.doom9.org/showthread.php?t=172553)

Thank you

[videoFred]

This MOV clip can be loaded in Avisynth with FFVideoSource()

I think the original capturing was already sharpened by the operator (at the source) and this is causing all your problems. So we must use some blur() before anything else. And crop the black borders of cource and remove the duplicate frames. Like this:


Loadplugin("ffms2.dll")
source=FFVideoSource("E:\Test Doom MOV\Sample8mm_1.mov").selecteven().crop(240,0,-240,0).blur(1.0).blur(1.0)


First, we must increase gamma because it's a very dark capturing. Then, tweaking the RGB levels.

Then we can degrain/denoise and very careful adding some sharpness again.

This is the best I could make from it:

https://www.dropbox.com/s/kket1hy81okpuxr/228_Bruce000002.bmp?dl=0

Used settings: RemoveDirtSMC: strength= 24
Mdegrain3: thSAD = 1200 (MvTools2)
UnsharpMask radius: 3 strength: 100

And then several steps sharpen/blur/sharpen etc...

PS: I will post the same answer on the other Forum hehe :D

Fred.